'We're crying out for storage'

QuotW This was the week when the Budget was released. George handed out some juicy tax breaks to game developers and the promise of sweet, speedy broadband to 10 UK cities. He also controversially lopped 5 per cent off the tax rate for top earners.

Meanwhile, boffins were complaining that the floods that carried away the homes and belongings of thousands of Thai people had affected them too. Peter Clarke, a top anti-matter boffin at CERN, bemoaned that the price of storage had limited the data they were able to crunch in a lecture on the LHC:

We're crying out for storage, and the floods in Thailand didn't help. It's compromising our experiment ... We have seven petabytes of storage and it's not enough.

In its preliminary statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, maker of mobes-and-other-stuff Foxconn explained that it really does do everything – confirming The Reg's long-held suspicion that all these fancy tech brands – Nokia, Sony, Apple and co – are really just Foxconn resellers.

The report said:

Our customers can now focus on product positioning, marketing, sales and distribution while leaving us to take care of their product design and supply chain.

But while China is ramping up mobe creation, it's clamping down on suspect Weibo searches. The government has tightened web censorship on Twitter-like blogging site Weibo after a prominent Chinese leader tried to defect to the States. Searches for his name, 'Bo Xilai', and the name of his son 'Zhou Yongkang' pulled up the following error message:

Based on current rules and regulations, this term cannot currently be searched.

Forget the size of the next iPhone screen... could Apple's next move be into consumer banking? One strategic marketing firm thinks so: Lee Powney, marketing chief at KAE, said: "It would take a remarkable display of discipline [for Apple] to resist" moving into banking. The survey concludes that Apple would "massively disrupt" any industry it got involved in, as Powney explains:

This research tells us Apple customers perceive a fit where at first glance we would assume the brand could not travel [...] This makes it a truly dangerous animal to a startling array of sectors.

You'd think Doctor Who would be in favour of useful technology like the internet, but he's told his new assistant to stay off it. Matt Smith has told new Who Girl Jenna-Louise Coleman not to go on the internet. The 25-year-old former Emmerdale actress, who is set to be the Time Lord's new assistant in the sci-fi show said:

I had some really good advice from Matt actually, which is to stay off the internet. So I'm going to follow that advice. No Googling – I'm on a Google ban!

Sadly, that means she'll never read the lovely comments on our lavish web report into her appointment.

Telco TalkTalk was looking on the bright side after being rated the UK's worst Telco provider for the second year in a row:

We're pleased that Ofcom saw less than half as many complaints about our broadband service than this time last year.

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